Month: September 2005

I saw this on the Daily Show and got a good laugh out of it, so I wanted to make sure that this little gem of a graphic was preserved for future reference before FEMA wakes up and removes it from their website.

Seller : “Sure, I hear your need. Since you’re an On Demand business that must respond quickly to customer needs, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll sell you a Hummer. You buy the Hummer from us at three times the normal market price. Since you only need a Ford Escort right now, just avoid using the rear 2/3 of this vehicle, only drive it in second gear and never go over 30 miles per hour. You pay for gas, maintenance, repairs and other modifications. And if you ever need the extra capacity that this bad boy offers, you can just call us up and we’ll figure out how to charge you for that as well. Sound good?”

The NY Times provides an OPML feed that lists their RSS feeds, but they are currently sending the wrong Content-Type with the HTTP response:

Content-Type: text/plain

According to the OPML spec (and, believe me, I’m using the term “spec” loosely), the correct Content-Type should be text/xml, text/x-opml or text/html depending on what the client says it can support.

Does this matter? Well, do web standards matter (only answer this question if you are willing to consider OPML a standard)? More importantly, this is just another indication that I’m spending too much time looking at HTTP headers.

I bumped into Yahoo’s new My Web 2.0 service today. It’s basically their del.icio.us-like social tagging and bookmarking service. Their new UI looks… well, alright, but it’s clear that they’re miles ahead of del.icio.us in terms of bringing this idea into the mainstream.

One feature of the Yahoo service is that it allows you to import your bookmarks from del.icio.us. I tried it and it seems to work just fine. It’s not, after all, that hard to do now that we don’t have to screenscrape anymore! mentax

This is completely valid HTTP, but I really wish they were sending back a proper Expires header like this:

Expires: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 15:12:45 GMT

If they sent back this HTTP header, my browser wouldn’t have to perform conditional-GET requests for subsequent loads of images on Flickr. The part of the HTTP request that makes the GET conditional is highlighted below:

Instead, my browser would notice that it has been told not to request this resource until Oct 24th, which is exactly one month from today and would display th e image from the local browser cache. There wouldn’t be any network overhead at all and Flickr images would be served a lot faster.

I don’t see what the point of only allowing conditional GET requests is. Flickr isn’t benefitting anybody by doing this. Failing to use Expires: headers for static content only serves to slow down the user experience and increase load on their systems.

Sysadmins at Flickr: read the mod_expires documentation and switch this thing on.